Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line lands like a rebuke delivered with a smile: wit matters, but only in the proportion that keeps a conversation edible. The metaphor does the heavy lifting. Salt sharpens flavor; it doesn’t replace the meal. By choosing something as ordinary and bodily as food, Hazlitt yanks “wit” down from the pedestal where salons and essayists like to park it. Cleverness isn’t a substitute for substance, and anyone who treats it that way is basically serving guests a shaker and calling it dinner.

The intent is partly aesthetic, partly moral. Hazlitt was a critic in an age that prized verbal sparkle - the Regency’s drawing-room brilliance, the cultivated jab, the epigram that could end an argument by winning the room. He admired intelligence, but he distrusted performance. The subtext reads like a warning to talkers who mistake domination for connection: if wit becomes the main course, it stops nourishing and starts stinging. You’re no longer exchanging ideas; you’re auditioning.

What makes the aphorism work is its quiet precision. “Salt” suggests restraint, but also a kind of discipline: enough to bring out the best in what’s already there. The best conversation, Hazlitt implies, is built on genuine material - observation, feeling, argument - and wit is the seasoning that keeps it lively without turning it into a contest of who can be sharpest. It’s a compact theory of social intelligence: charm should illuminate, not eclipse.